The War Is Over?
Posted on August 14th, 2005 in Uncategorized | 10 Comments »
That, at least, is the argument made by Frank Rich in today’s Times. Whatever the president may be saying, Rich argues, “the country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We’re outta there.”
I think Rich may be right: there does seem to be something fundamental that’s transpired in the past week or so. Maybe it’s the combination of increased mortality in Iraq (all those Ohio deaths); Cindy Sheehan’s meta-protest; and a Pentagon general talking about a schedule for troop withdrawal.
And as I’ve noted before, Bush’s rhetoric about the rationale for the war seems increasingly…dumb. And I don’t use that word glibly. What I mean is that when he says we’re in Iraq because it’s a locus (not a word he’d use) of terrorism, we all know that it is such only because we invaded the country, and it wasn’t before. When he says that we’re fighting the terrorists over there so that we don’t have to confront them here, in our “homeland”âGod, I hate that word, what was wrong with “country”?âthe hollowness of the argument is so obvious, it’s almost embarrassing. Hence: dumb. Bush is trying to convince us of things that are patently untrue, and while it may have worked for some time, the rote repetition of these lines is making the president look out of touch and stupid.
This war, which never had a deep well of public support anyway, is fast losing whatever support it did have.
I recognize that this represents a political opportunity for Democrats and opponents of the war. Fair enough. But before progressives jump completely aboard the Cindy Sheehan bandwagon, we need to remember something Bill Clinton pointed out on CNN the other day: Whatever the reason for us going into Iraq, we are there now, and it’s in our interest to have a successful outcome there. Democrats can’t just sit back and enjoy the president’s problems…they need to come up with some solutions. And just saying what a hero Cindy Sheehan is isn’t enough.
10 Responses
8/15/2005 3:13 am
When you say that Bush wouldn’t describe Iraq as a “locus” of terrorism, I suppose you mean he isn’t prone to a pretentious turn of phrase?
8/15/2005 7:27 am
“Locus” is pretentious? It’s a five-letter word…
8/15/2005 6:49 pm
Do you really believe that Cindy Sheehan is a hero?
From Opinion Journal’s Best of the Web today…
The Sorrow and the Pity
Time magazine reports that Cindy Sheehan’s family is “imploding”:
Sheehan lost her job at Napa County [Calif.] Health and Human Services because of all her absences, she says. Husband Pat, 52, couldn’t bear having [fallen son] Casey’s things at home and put most of them in storage. “We grieved in totally different ways,” Cindy says. “He wanted to grieve by distracting himself. I wanted to immerse myself.” . . . The couple separated in June.
Daughter Carly, 24, wrote a poem that begins, “Have you ever heard the sound of a mother screaming for her son?” Surviving son Andy, 21, supports his mother in principle but recently sent her a long e-mail imploring her “to come home because you need to support us at home,” he says.
The New York Times reports that Mrs. Sheehan’s politics were the cause of her marital collapse:
She said she and her husband separated a few months ago as a result of the war, and of her activism. Although she and her estranged husband are both Democrats, she said she is more liberal than he is, and now, more radicalized.
The Times doesn’t elaborate on Mrs. Sheehan’s description of herself as “radicalized.” Through her own words, unreported by either Time or the Times, she makes clear that she has embraced a grotesque ideology that goes far beyond garden-variety Angry Left paranoia-though it includes plenty of that, as National Review’s Byron York reported last week:
“This is something that can’t be ignored,” Sheehan said during a conference call with bloggers representing sites like democrats.com, codepink4peace.org, and crooksandliars.com. “They can’t ignore us, and they can’t put us down. Thank God for the Internet, or we wouldn’t know anything, and we would already be a fascist state.”
“Our government is run by one party, every level,” Sheehan continued, “and the mainstream media is a propaganda tool for the government.” Sheehan also called the 2004 presidential election “the election, quote-unquote, that happened in November.”
Sheehan spoke at an April San Francisco State University rally in support of Lynne Stewart, who was convicted in February of providing material aid to terrorists. Here’s an excerpt:
I was raised in a country by a public school system that taught us that America was good, that America was just. America has been killing people . . . since we first stepped on this continent, we have been responsible for death and destruction. I passed on that bullshit to my son and my son enlisted. I’m going all over the country telling moms: “This country is not worth dying for.” If we’re attacked, we would all go out. We’d all take whatever we had. I’d take my rolling pin and I’d beat the attackers over the head with it. But we were not attacked by Iraq. We might not even have been attacked by Osama bin Laden if 9/11 was their Pearl Harbor to get their neo-con agenda through and, if I would have known that before my son was killed, I would have taken him to Canada. I would never have let him go and try and defend this morally repugnant system we have. The people are good, the system is morally repugnant. . . .
What they’re saying, too, is like, it’s okay for Israel to have nuclear weapons. But Iran or Syria better not get nuclear weapons. It’s okay for the United States to have nuclear weapons. It’s okay for the countries that we say it’s okay for. We are waging a nuclear war in Iraq right now. That country is contaminated. It will be contaminated for practically eternity now. It’s okay for them to have them, but Iran or Syria can’t have them. It’s okay for Israel to occupy Palestine, but it’s-yeah-and it’s okay for Iraq to occupy-I mean, for the United States to occupy Iraq, but it’s not okay for Syria to be in Lebanon.
Earlier in April, at a speech before the United Methodist Church in Venice, Calif., Sheehan likened Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to “Hitler and Stalin” and was particularly lurid in describing her hatred of Rumsfeld’s then-deputy:
As soft-spoken and sincere-sounding as Paul Wolfowitz is, is there yet any sane adult in this country whose skin does not crawl when this murderous liar opens his mouth and speaks?
She concluded: “In their secret hiding places, while celebrating newly won fortunes with their fellow brass, these men must surely congratulate themselves with orgies of carnal pleasure as they mock the multitudes who are yet so blind as to mistake them for God’s devoted servants.”
The mainstream media have largely ignored Sheehan’s crackpot views, and not only-perhaps not even primarily-for ideological reasons. Members of the White House press corps find the annual sojourn to Crawford deathly dull. They need something to do; they want bylines-and “heartbroken everymom” makes for a much more compelling story than “extremist hatemonger.”
The journalists will soon move on, and her political allies may do so as well. For them she is a mere instrument. The White House press corps will discard her as soon as they return to Washington where there’s real news going on. Serious opponents of the war in Iraq will cast her aside if her foul statements make her an embarrassment. When that happens, we can only hope that someone still cares about Cindy Sheehan-not as a story or a symbol, but as a human being.
8/15/2005 7:45 pm
Some more quotes from your “hero” Rich…
“Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full well that my son, my family, this nation and this world were betrayed by George Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agendas after 9/11. We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy … not for the real reason, because the Arab Muslims who attacked us hate our middle-eastern foreign policy”
Lovely!
8/16/2005 9:53 am
She may be a bit irrate, but some points she makes should not be dismissed out of hand. It seems very unlikely that anyone hates freedome per se, and quite likely that US foreign policy has a great deal to do with the preception of the US abroad.
In both of the Elections that George Bush Jr. won, there were many anomolies which may have effected voter turn out and election results, these are well documented and one should not be labelled a loony or even radical for pointing them out.
8/16/2005 10:38 am
I agree with the last anonymous poster.
Do I really believe she’s a hero? I don’t think I wrote that, did I? it’s a tough question. I think she’s courageous, in her way…although I certainly don’t agree with everything she says, and her politics are considerably to the left of mine.
But as the bottom poster says, she does make some good points that are not easily dismissed….
8/16/2005 9:05 pm
Why do you both have such trouble calling out blatent anti-semitism when you see it? Do you really believe that there is a neocon cabal that sent America to war in Iraq to benefit Israel? That her son died to benefit Israel? I’m just calling attention to the ugly politics of this woman that are being downplayed in the story of a mother who lost her son in Iraq.
8/16/2005 10:24 pm
Because I haven’t heard her say anything but “Israel out of Palestine,” and that’s not enough to call her out as anti-Semitic. But if there’s more, I’m open to hearing it.
8/17/2005 1:12 am
“Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the army to protect America, not Israel.”
I don’t know about you Rich, but to me calling our involvement in Iraq a Neo-con agenda to benefit Israel and that her son joined the army to protect America, not Israel is certainly skirting fairly close to the line of anti-semitism.
8/17/2005 8:16 am
There is a difference between Judaism and the state of Israel, is there not? Certainly one can find something to criticize about the policies of the state of Israel without necessarily hating Judaism.
It is a point of fact that many leaders of the neo-conservative movement are jewish, and many leaders of the neo-conservative movement are strongly committed to the interests of the state of Israel. This is hardly controversial, and pointing it out is certainly not tantamount to anti-semitisim or conspiracy theory.
Most jewish leaders and intellectuals are not neoconservative and indeed some (Albert Einstein, Noam Chomsky) are anti-zionist.